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Embarcadero discontinues AppMethod - the risks of the subscription model

Submitted by ldsandon on Thu, 2016/01/14 - 20:22

Embarcadero (recently acquired by Idera) announced AppMethod, its cross-platform only development tools, available only under a subscription model (Individuals $299 per year, per developer, per platform. Enterprise $999 per year, per developer) and launched less than two years ago, will be no longer be available, and "will be merged into RAD Studio 10". Actually, AppMethod (what a stupid name, sure), was just a subset of RAD Studio, thereby this is no surprise - nothing really to merge, no effort required by Embarcadero.

What requires more effort, is the price actual users will be forced to pay when their subscription expires. RAD Studio, or Delphi with the mobile development pack, are far more expensive. I'm sure it won't impact a lot of customers (I guess it's been discontinued because of low sales also), but this story is a good indicator of the risks of the subscription model. Whenever your supplier decides to change and charge you more, you'll be in troubled waters. The product wil expire, stop working partially or fully, and you'll be forced or to swallow the bitter pill and shell out more money, or port everything to a different tool quickly, you can't rely on the old tool while looking for a new boat.

Once again, Embarcadero has shown customers are just cows to milk in its desperate attempts to increase revenues while delivering no value to customers. All they offer are "extended, fully functioning trials for RAD Studio" (bold mine). Not even a discounted price on RAD Studio.

If this is an example of what will happen under Idera, it doesn't bode well...